A Phoronix reader, Ryan Bram, wrote in to share word on this new desktop environment being developed by the PC-BSD crew, the popular desktop-focused derivative of FreeBSD. This new desktop is called Lumina and is being developed as a home-grown desktop environment catered toward this BSD operating system.

While it's obviously cool, I wonder if it's a wise idea to undertake such a huge endeavour. I honestly doubt PC-BSD has the developers, testers, and users required for creating, maintaining, and improving an entire desktop environment.

BSD has NEVER used SysV init, even when it still came from Berkeley. They use their own BSD style init, which is simpler but still shell based.

FreeBSD has moved from rc to rc.d, beginning somewhere in v5, if I remember correctly. In rc style init system, /etc/rc will execute other scripts like rc.local, rc.network, rc.firewall, rc.foo, rc.bla and so on. A comparable initialization mechanism has been used in System III if my memory serves me right. The newer rc.d system uses shell scripts located in the /etc/rc.d directory which contain keywords in order to have rc determine the correct order (PROVIDE and REQUIRE). Those scripts act according to parameters like "start" and "stop", they can be used in combination with the "service" command.

However, FreeBSD can emulate SysV init (see "man init" for details) when called as a user process, for example "init 1" or "init c".